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“It used to be Congress versus the administration; now it feels like the administration is at least coming around to the Republican point of view” on trade, a Democratic congressional aide said, adding that “it’s going to be hard for them to work with Democrats in a productive way.”

Never mind the Progressive-Democrats’ refusal to work with the White House or Republicans in a productive way. “A productive way” means, as it always has, doing it the Progressive-Democrats’ way.

Senator and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (I [sic], VT) has the canonical version of Medicare for All; the other Progressive-Democrat candidates have only slightly varied versions of it. Here’s Sanders on his Next Big Idea for health care provision and health care coverage:

You will have a card which has Medicare on it, you’ll go to any doctor that you want, you’ll go to any hospital that you want.

Right. Been there, done that. Both claims were straight up lies then, too. There is a major difference, though, between Sanders’ two lies and ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) two lies: Sanders would make private insurance illegal—both the selling and the possessing. That, though, only potentiates the power of Sanders’ lies.

Carol Roth, in her op-ed for FOXBusiness, said that Socialism begins with good intentions.

No, socialism does not. Perhaps the first attempts did, but with its unbroken history of wealth concentration, power concentration, and utter failure—even for those in the concentrated top—before us and well known, that much is clear. On the contrary, those proselytizing for and instigating socialist regimes have as their sole goal the accretion of wealth and power to themselves—and this time it’ll be different, this time they’ll pull it off.

Roth’s piece had a number of internal contradictions that illustrate the origins of socialist regimes, even though she seems to have missed them.

…again. This time it’s over the US’ decision to implement all of the Helms-Burton Act, to stop waiving Title III of the Act. Helms-Burton, you’ll recall, is a law passed in 1996 that pressured Cuba and its trading partners to not traffic in Cuban government-appropriated -stolen private property, property that was seized by that government over the course its power-grabbing in the days following Fidel Castro’s successful rebellion.

Title III created a private cause of action, allowing private citizens whose property had been confiscated by the Cuban government to sue those trafficking in that property for monetary compensation for the loss, plus court and attorney costs associated with the suit. The Title also contained within it authority for the President to waive the Title for six-month periods.

She says that Attorney General William Barr lied to the Senate in Wednesday’s Senate hearing because he refused to say what Progressive-Democrats want him to say. This was emphasized by Senator Mazie Hirono (D, HI), who spent nearly all of her question-time in that hearing smearing Barr (with charges of lying) instead of asking him questions.

Pelosi also gleefully has called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) the grim reaper (following McConnell’s statement that he’d have to be the Grim Reaper if the Pelosi persisted in sending up her bad and partisan Progressive legislation).

Amazingly, there’s an actual debate going on over whether consumers should be allowed to see drug prices in drug advertising.

Stacie Dusetzina, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine’s Associate Professor of Health Policy and the Ingram Associate Professor of Cancer Research, argued—in all seriousness—in a recent Wall Street Journal example of the debate (see the link) in favor of the following points:

disclosure of list prices may deter some people from seeking treatment

disclosing prices could backfire by creating an artificial sense of “value” due to a high price tag

under the pretense of “helping” folks afford housing in this manufactured crisis of housing.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has proposed funding housing for families whose income normally wouldn’t qualify them for assistance programs. Last month, his administration set aside $200 million for middle-class families in a $750 million package meant to combat the state’s housing crisis.
DC Mayor Muriel E Bowser has proposed a $20 million workforce fund to help families earning up to $141,000.

That’s what Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Hamlet’s poor relation Joe Biden, said we’re in as he opened his campaign.

We are in the battle for the soul of this nation[.] If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter….

Indeed, we are in a battle for our nation’s soul. It’s a battle between one party that actively tries to improve the situations of our nation’s citizens—whether we agree with those policies or not—and a party that has no aim for our people’s benefit, but is focused solely on anti-Trumpism.

Call me Luddite. A short time ago, Samsung decided to delay the rollout of its foldable cell phone for a month. I won’t miss it.

My beef isn’t the growing pains associated with the device; all of those are just Samsung’s hurried and botched release before the thing was ready for prime time. My beef is with the price and capability of the thing, stipulating that Samsung will solve those rollout problems.

Samsung’s Galaxy Fold will set you back two grand for a midget tablet’s display that’s part of a pocket calculator of limited calculational capability that also runs an app for making telephone calls. Huawei is planning a fall rollout of a slightly larger and much more expensive foldable cell—theirs will run $2,600.

The Supreme Court has taken up the case of Iancu v Brunetti and heard oral arguments Monday. Erik Brunetti wanted a copyright on the label for a clothing line of his that he’d named FUCT, an acronym for Friends U Can’t Trust. Iancu is Andrei Iancu, who is duel-hatted as Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Wearing that second hat, Iancu and his fellow USPTO bureaucrats said they were scandalized and morally offended, and they denied Brunetti’s copyright application. The Wall Street Journal, at the link, said

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TANSTAAFL

2 + 2 = 4
--Polish proverb

Be not intimidated... nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice.
--John Adams

Nothing in the universe has a shorter half-life than a politician's memory for inconvenient facts.
--Admiral Hamish Alexander, RMN

Dawn is nature's way of telling you to go to bed.
And to just stay there until the evil yellow disk is gone again.
--Anonymous

In a polity, each citizen is to possess his own arms, which are not supplied or owned by the state.
--Aristotle

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
--Chief Justice John Roberts.

A yawn is a silent scream for coffee.
--Shane Mclean

If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six hours sharpening my ax.
--Abraham Lincoln

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Who is this Pogue?

I'm a USAF vet, a quasi-retired Systems Engineer, and writer. In my spare time, I turn exotic woods into piles of sawdust and kindling, out of which occasionally sticks a piece of furniture that doesn't look too bad from a distance, with my glasses off.
Oh, and I have a rather dyspeptic view of Big Government.

Contact

eehines1473 -at- yahoo dot com

The image in the header is from NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity on its 11-year anniversary on the Red Planet. [I]t has used its Pancam (fancy name for its panoramic camera) to snap this wide view from atop "Cape Tribulation," a part of Endeavour Crater's rim that sits at a height of 440 feet. That's 80 percent of the height of the Washington Monument, NASA says.

The photo was taken on January 6 and released by NASA January 22, 2015.